The Mozilla support project

SUMO Localization Dashboard

One of the main priorities for SUMO in 2009 is to make localization simpler. More specifically, part 5 of the Vision for SUMO includes ideas about a clear locale overview, which is something that a lot of localizers we’ve been in touch with has asked for.

After sharing these ideas with some of the many localizers of SUMO and collecting feedback, we’ve made a mockup of how this overview could look like — let’s call it the SUMO Localization Dashboard:

Mockup of SUMO Localization Dashboard.

There are a few things we’re hoping this dashboard will achieve:

To provide a clear overview and status of the l10n work on SUMO

To make the l10n work on SUMO feel less daunting by making it obvious where to start

To answer the question: “which article is the most important to translate next?”

To establish a baseline of what we define as a healthy status of a locale, so we can make sure we provide help where it’s needed the most.

On this dashboard, we would also show full lists of articles and their translation status, with direct links to getting started with a translation or article review:

List of the most popular support articles and their translation status.

If you’re a localizer of SUMO, we’d love to hear what you think of these ideas and whether this dashboard would be helpful! Please share your thoughts by commenting on this blog post. For the complete details, see this project page.

Looks awesome. Please add to the first mock-up some information about how many articles are translated, and not just percents. Also, we need better control about articles which changed in the original language. I am not going to look on every page just to see what changed and if it require some actions from us.

Hey Tomer, thanks for the feedback. The problem with the number of articles is that it depends on which articles you translate. We could say how many articles are usually required to reach 50% (which the text below the status bar also does in the mockup), but if you translate other articles that are less frequently visited, you may need to translate more articles than that.

Of course, the best for everyone (in our support communities, and our users) is to translate the most visited pages, as that means the more users are helped by it.

About the other request, that’s definitely something we need: an overview of articles that have been changed and needs approval. That’s something that we should be showing on the contributor home page. It’s not restricted to l10n, but is something we should have on the en-US page as well.